Great atmosphere. Lots of Apple blue-shirts walking around inside & outside chatting with people. Anyone who needed help inside the store had no problems finding someone to ask.

I’m sure it was hectic, but did you see any Macs leave the store?

Sorry, DT. I had things to do and didn’t hang around to observe.

Opening day is a challenging day to keep track of anything happening in the stores. My recent suggests the retail stores are a Mac unit sales catalyst and the more stores open the more Macs that will be sold. I do think the wait on Lion pushed some Mac sales into this quarter.

I’d like to see an Apple Store here on Vancouver Island. Nanaimo would be great, Woodgrove IS the biggest mall on the Island, but even Victoria would work. The Island has a population in the 750k range and has a good proportion of computer savvy people. I’m sure it would make money. There’s an Apple Store in Vancouver but BCFerries absurd pricing means that we don’t leave the island as often as we used to. I’d spend ~$30 for gas several times a year to drive to a Victoria Store, where I can’t justify ~$150 RT for the ferry to visit the Vancouver Store.

Come on Apple, Minneapolis/St. Paul has something like four Apple Stores (I got opening day shirts from both the Mall of America and Rosedale stores). I’d think Vancouver Island could easily support one.

Living in SW greater Miami area, I have one store about a mile away at The Falls shopping center, another maybe five miles north at Dadeland Mall, another on South Beach, and one more in Aventura, far up in the NE corner of the county.

On opening day for the Dadeland store, I arrived at about 8:15 a.m. to find only some 75-100 people in line already. My part of the line waited around the corner from the store. At about 8:50 we heard a commotion starting up?all the Apple employees were out in the mall singing, doing cheers, and generally getting the crowd riled up.

When they finally opened right at 9:00, the employees formed a “gauntlet” of applause to welcome each customer as we passed through. It was a hoot.

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I live in San Diego California and have three Apple Stores within 10-15 miles. There are two others that are farther out, but still in the metro area.

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“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.” E. M. Forster

I was at the new Apple retail store at the Valencia Town Center early this afternoon. I see the store as a boost to a city is a classic example of an American boomburb and a city that has really come into its own in the almost 25 years since it was formally incorporated.

This new store exemplifies the growth in the presence of Apple’s retail stores and a gradual change in site selections. Boomburbs have grown in influence over the past decade and often have satellite “exurb” communities. With colleges and universities nearby and major freeways serving surrounding communities, these stores may have a powerful impact on Mac penetration in the local communities and draw customers from the larger geographic area.

In Honolulu where I spent much of the WINTER , we have really interesting apple stores 3 within 4.4 miles of each other! See the little map and try to pronounce the HWY for store # 3!
One in the enormous Ala Moana Shopping center mall - outdoor walkways and every high end store known to man always busy busy busy and sort of small, the second
then (heading East!) another on the main drag in Waikiki near the pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel - more spacious best place for one-to-one classes or less stressed genius bar visits, then lastly further out the last Mall you can find to the east (has a Whole Foods) - Kahala Mall. An All indoors mall.
I walk to the first 2 stores from where I stay and never really drive to the 3rd.

There are signs in Japanese in the stores as the Japanese visitors frequent the stores all the time.

NOW TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, Fir Tree and Salmon Ipad deficient in Oregon ...No apple stores in the Southern Part of WA state where I live - you have to cross the border south…but then…
In Oregon…
Near Portland, you have 3 stores very close - 1. downtown Portland (whole foods around the corner here) , then heading east 2. Washington Square Mall on HWY 217 (no whole foods but an enormous starbucks with something like a 30 foot ceiling ) and then only a few miles down the road off I-5 3. another store in Bridgeport Village! (whole foods across the street here)

I love all these stores. I found it interesting that security guards are posted prominently at the Honolulu stores,which enables them to keep those tiny little ipods hanging on hooks next to where you would buy the “accessories and hard drives”. Perfect for impulse buying!

Even with the same realestate on the wall in Oregon, NOOOOO ipods - the sales folks get them from the back if you want one after trying them at the locked down stations!

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Personally I am not a particular fan of Apple products. Yes, I have a iPod, but no Mac and no iPad. I have a PC, an LG mobile phone and no tablet.

My wife (who doesn?t like computers) had become interested in getting an iPad, not through hearing a clever presentation by Steve Jobs, but rather through observing how easily some of our friends were using their iPads. So she wanted to see for herself.

When I accompanied her to an Apple store recently, I was amazed at how patient the salesperson was with my wife?s many questions. After he had shown her the basics, he kept finding more and more things to show her. ?Would you like to see this? This is really cool!? His enthusiasm was infectious.

I had the feeling that if my wife had wanted to spend all day exploring her new purchase, he would have been quite happy to do so. Not the slightest hint that this was taking an enormous amount of time or that he might have other things to do. The three of us were kidding around and having a grand old time. Since my wife has brought the iPad home, she has been happily using it and has never had to ask me a single question about how to use it (unlike every other electronic device she has ever bought).

From a cost-accounting perspective, the way Apple?s store is run makes no sense. The sales people are wasting ridiculous amounts of time with customers, hanging around, talking with them long after the sale is made. But what the cost accountants don?t see is that those interactions turn customers into raving fans, so that the customers don?t care what the product costs. They have just GOT to have it. And what?s more, they have GOT to tell their friends about it (sometimes with annoying frequency).

I have said many times: Apple doesn’t sell products. Apple creates customer relationships and those relationships sell Apple products. The goal of the store staff is create and strengthen customer relationships first and foremost. I don’t understand why, after so many years, it’s so challenging for otherwise bright and reasonable people to understand this concept.

The interaction between this person, his wife and the store sales person may have cemented a product relationship for the next ten years with a revenue yield into the five figures. How could anyone think that’s a waste of the sales person’s time?

I’m in Salt Lake City and we have had an apple store for some time downtown. They are putting a new one in closer to the center of the population mass, which is quite near me. I’m looking forward to it, as the other store was always incredibly busy and rather far away from me. The many experiences I have had at apple stores have all been wonderfully positive and I believe this aspect of their business in the best in the industry.

On another topic that has been brought up in this thread…I am a lifelong apple user. I have owned at least 6 apple computers I can think of, 3 ipods and an iphone. Lately, I have switched away from their products. I use a Droid X for a cellphone and just bought a 32gig HP touchpad for $134. I couldn’t justify the $500 price tag on an iPad2, even though I think it is the superior product. I will be attempting to port android onto the touchpad soon. 2 of the 3 computers I use at work are Mac, getting roughly 95% of the total usage (the PC is mostly used for testing).

Though I believe apple’s products (and certainly customer service) are generally superior, I had to move away from AT&T because it was a horrible network and at roughly 1/4 of the price, the HP tablet is a far better (albeit likely a 1 off) deal. I hope apple soon realizes they are missing out on a huge piece of the pie by offering so few products in their line. For me, the 4 buttons on my droid phone all get used constantly, the replaceable battery means I can carry an extra with me at all times and the HDMI out was a must. Offering less expensive and more customizable options may cut into their profit margins a bit, but I believe this would be offset by an incredible jump in volume.

I love apple as a company to own stock in, but I wonder how long it will take them to pursue other parts of the market that crave individualized phones, tablets and service providers (this they have already addressed).

I think apple will not worry about the market segment you describe until they have saturated the market segment they are currently targeting, at the prices they offer. Much of the world wants Apple products as offered and Apple can’t make them fast enough. The fact that the iPhone 4, long in the tooth that it is, a veritable dinosaur in smartphone lineage, remains the number one such phone says a great deal.

I hope you find your touchpad to meet all your needs. Porting Android onto it demonstrates that you are not the average tablet customer, who just wants the device to be great out of the box, as designed.

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I have said many times: Apple doesn’t sell products. Apple creates customer relationships and those relationships sell Apple products. The goal of the store staff is create and strengthen customer relationships first and foremost. I don’t understand why, after so many years, it’s so challenging for otherwise bright and reasonable people to understand this concept.

The interaction between this person, his wife and the store sales person may have cemented a product relationship for the next ten years with a revenue yield into the five figures. How could anyone think that’s a waste of the sales person’s time?

The Forbes article, while mostly correct, utterly failed to account for those buyers who arrive knowing exactly what they want. Say, the countless people who call out the iPod, Mac, iPhone, or iPad by name and model. While the author focused on “cost accounting” (and is he even looking at the term in its usual sense?) and was fascinated by the extended conversations with prospective buyers, he failed to notice all the customers walking out the door with hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars worth of Apple Store purchases. The “soft sell” is a hallmark Apple Store feature, but it mostly aids the customer loyalty side of the equation, while the rest of the sales staff go about their business and net $10M+ in “unnoticed” average store sales.

The author also fails to understand just how “easy” it is for an Apple Store to hit $10 million in sales every quarter. 15 Macs, 40 iPads and 80 iPhones a day gets most of the way there.